


twelve days

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-02 23:15:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 9,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2829539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He’s just trying to ruin Christmas.  Again."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I am a poor boy too

Everyone tells her she’s lucky to have such a quiet baby.  It’s true he rarely cries, even when she knows he’s hungry, as if he’s somehow resigned himself at a young age to unfulfilled desire.  He’s not even talking yet, not a single word. But she’d gladly trade in her quiet baby for one that’s _still._ Hands everywhere, curious fingers reaching up to grasp anything within reach, bring it up before his unblinking blue stare.  He pulls things apart to examine their insides, consternation twisting up his little brow.  By the time he’s fourteen months and incongruous evergreen wreaths dusted with plastic snow are starting to appear in Galveston shop windows, she’s not willing to even entertain the idea of bringing a Christmas tree into their tiny apartment.  She imagines him electrocuting himself with a string of lights, strangling himself with tinsel, slitting himself in the throat with broken glass from a decorative ball.  

She doesn’t know where such thoughts come from.

“You can’t _not_ have a tree,” Trisha says, popping her gum as she counts down her register at the McCrory’s where they both work.  “Kid’s gonna end up fucked up enough as it is, growing up in that shitty apartment of yours with no dad.  Least you can do is give him a real Christmas.”

Eileen wants to grab her by her long dark ponytail and smash her face against the cash register, but she doesn’t and she’s glad two days later when she gets off work and finds Trish standing by her car, smoking a Pall Mall and guarding a large cardboard box.

“Musta miscounted inventory,” she says with a wry smile, and helps Eileen load the box into the trunk.

It’s a dull green thing, made of the same stuff as the grass that goes in Easter baskets. It’s attached to stainless steel branches that fold out like some kind of mechanical spider questing for prey.  It’s barely any taller than Rusty.  She spends her day off stringing cranberries and popcorn onto a thread and then pockets a single strand of lights from a window display at work.  Finally, one muggy evening a week before Christmas, she sets the tree up, says a prayer than the damn thing doesn’t go up in a heap of smoldering cranberry-scented melted green plastic, and plugs in the lights.

She thinks they’re broken for a second and then realizes they’re the kind that blink on and off.  Well, shit, that’s no good--he’s sure as hell not gonna be able to keep his hands off _those._ She turns toward her son, already unconsciously moving into position to grab the back of his overalls and drag him away from disaster as she has so many times before.  

But Rusty's not moving.

His mouth is slightly agape, a little pink bow like an angel’s in a church painting.  The lights cast a warm glow over his face and hair, honey-colored like that of the man whose face she barely remembers. The only movement is the twinkling of the lights in his eyes, which seem impossibly wide, impossibly blue.  She’s never seen him look so at ease.

“Do you like the lights, Rusty?” she says, and she's surprised at the calm in her own voice, too.  “Aren’t they pretty?”

He doesn’t take his eyes off the tree, but his lips meet for a moment as he wraps them around his first words.

“Wights,” he says. “Pwetty.”

 


	2. little lord Jesus no crying he makes

From Texas to Colorado he was motionless, petrified, little fists wrapped so tight around a ragged teddy bear that his knuckles showed white.  Travis had tried to talk to him, but how the fuck do you make conversation with a two-year-old?  Somewhere south of Denver he finally falls into an exhausted sleep, eyes darting restlessly behind tissue-paper lids, fingers refusing to loosen from the toy’s fur.  

Travis rolls down the window to light a cigarette, then thinks better of it when cold December wind knifes through the truck and he sees the boy, clad only in a thin t-shirt, shiver in his sleep.  There wasn’t a coat among the meager possessions Travis shoved into a knapsack before they took off.  He rifles around behind the seat for an old military-issue blanket and tucks it around the boy.

He makes a cut through the woods just before they cross into BC to avoid border guards who might ask too many questions--about the kid, or about the guns in the back, or about the stench of cannabis that hangs around the truck like a dark green fog.  The road is rough, though, and the truck old; it jumps and jostles like a drop of water on a hot griddle and Rustin starts from sleep and begins to cry.  

He’s not even looking at Travis--his eyes are glued to the window, staring in terror at the colorless blur falling past.  Well, of course, Travis realizes--goddamn kid’s never seen snow.

He doesn’t make a sound, not really, other than a sharp intake of breath, soft ragged sobs, little gulps like he’s drowning.  Travis isn’t sure what he expected--it’s not as if he’s spent a lot of time around crying toddlers--but there’s something unnerving about the near-silence of his son’s weeping, like it doesn’t occur to him to alert anyone to his sorrow.  

He thinks of a boy he watched dying once, barely eighteen, his guts stretched halfway across the jungle, his left arm two clicks back.  His eyes looked like that, empty and defeated, and he made the same voiceless noise--a worn-out, ripped-up sound.  It’s more than Travis can stand.

“Rustin.  Hey.  Rust.”  He abbreviates the name without realizing he’s going to do it; it suits him, somehow, with his sharp-boned face and dustbowl-colored hair.   _Rusty,_ Eileen called him, as if he weren’t two going on two hundred.  “Rust, hey, it’s all right, shhh.”

A quick series of sniffles, as if he’s desperately trying to get ahold of himself.  When he lets out a breath it’s like his lungs are being flattened; it’s the saddest fucking sound he’s ever heard.  He looks around the truck desperately for something to distract the boy with.  

“Hey, you like music, kid?”

There’s no way they’re gonna pick up fuck-all but static out here, but he turns the knob and somehow the truck is filled with the sound of bells and strings and almost psychotically cheerful trumpets.  It’s a goddamned Christmas miracle.  Travis has never liked this fucking song, but to his own surprise, he finds himself singing along loudly and enthusiastically, complete with exaggerated gestures.  And Rust stops crying.

At first he only stares at Travis as if he’s certain that this strange man has lost his mind.  He’d never thought it was possible for a two-year-old to look so _judgmental_ .  It’s a change at least, though, and so he really throws himself into it, bringing his hands up to his head in the shape of antlers: “ _all of the other reindeer used to_ \--oh, son of a motherfucker!”

Turns out that taking your hands off the wheel in the woods at midnight in the snow is a bad idea.  Travis has driven through worse, though, and he manages to right the truck without going off the road, although not before letting forth a string of creative profanity--“goddamn motherfucking son of a motherless _whore_!”

He turns to his son again, sure that he’s scared the shit out of him--but Rust is watching his tirade with fascination.  A wide grin crosses his face and, hand to Christ, he starts _giggling_.  He kicks his little heels against the seat.  

“Motherfucker,” he says decisively.


	3. the holly bears a prickle / as sharp as any thorn

“Miss Williams!  Rustin’s being bad again.”

Sandra Williams sighs inwardly.  Becky Dennis is a notorious tattletale, always ready to condemn one of her fellow third-graders with a self-righteous shake of her yellow pigtails.  But it’s always  _something_ with the ragged, gangly-limbed, hollow-eyed son of the crazy old vet who brews moonshine out in the bush behind his falling-down cabin. If he’s not denouncing the monthly Honor Roll (“how exactly are you defining  _honor_ , Principal Winston?”) or arguing the finer points of the events of 1492, he’s breaking the noses of kids twice his size when they taunt him about his crazy old man and patched-up clothes.  It’s not that she doesn’t know how to deal with difficult children; out here north of nowhere, they’re all difficult in one way or another: children of alcoholics, draft-dodgers or, in the case of Becky Dennis, charismatic preachers.  But she finds the Cohle boy both pathetic and deeply unnerving.  The best thing she can say about him is that he colors inside the lines and only shows up one day out of every three.

She takes a deep breath, pastes on her brightest smile, and turns to face the small cluster of eight-year-olds sitting cross-legged in a circle on the faded carpet.  Only Becky is standing, hands planted indignantly on her hips. Teriaq Hendricks and Billy Carson look uncomfortable at the outburst; Ben Nayokpuk and Marcia Lewis look bored; Raymond Richards is, as usual, eating the crayons.  And at the back of the circle, his hands folded calmly in his lap but his jaw set with telltale stubbornness, is Rustin Cohle.  

“Okay, Becky,” she says with as much calm as she can muster.  “What’s the problem?”

Becky points an accusatory finger in Rustin’s direction.  “He said the baby Jesus isn’t real!”

Until Becky’s father set up shop in a little whitewashed chapel on the town square, most of the children who’d come through her classroom in the last ten years had been non-churchgoing Christians of some stripe.  For the past nine years all of them, even the Shapiro twins, had dutifully sat in a circle and colored the paper dolls that went into the classroom’s cardboard Nativity scene every December, with little disagreement among them other than back in ‘66 when Mariah Thompson insisted that the wisemen should be clad in pink and purple polka-dotted robes.  Just her dumb luck to get Anaktuvuk Elementary’s first juvenile atheist.  

She turns to Rustin.  There’s no point demanding an explanation; she’s either going to get petulant silence or a ten-minute diatribe.  She watches his thin chest inflate as he takes a deep breath.  The latter, then.

The speech starts with the Council of Nicaea and ends with Vatican II, and in between runs the gamut from the Greek translation of the the word “virgin” to Anglo-Saxon solstice festivals to taxation schedules in ancient Judea.  His curls bounce emphatically and his voice drips with profound contempt for monotheism in general and Reverend Dennis’s Congregation of the Blessed Redeemer in particular.  Just when Sandra is starting to wonder if she should just try to physically remove him from the room, he finally concludes: “The baby Jesus is  _bullshit_ .”  

Becky’s face has been growing progressively redder throughout his speech and now she looks like she’s on the verge of stroke.  She raises her tightly balled fists in Rustin’s direction and screams “YOU. ARE. THE.  _ANTICHRIST!!!_ ”  

For a fleeting moment, Rustin looks taken aback, as if he’s a bit worried that Becky might be right after all.  Then he starts to fold his Virgin Mary paper doll, over and over, into an impossibly tiny square. “Yeah, well,” he says calmly without looking at Becky, “you’re an ignorant bitch.”

Becky gasps, Teriaq bursts into tears, and Raymond chokes on his crayon.  Rustin is suspended for three days, but he doesn’t come back until sometime after New Year’s.


	4. through the rude wind's wild lament / and the bitter weather

It’s not that he’s that good in bed.

(Not _bed_ , exactly, Marcia thinks with a giggle.  Never in a bed.  Twice now under the bleachers at Wickersham High; once in the girls’ locker room, his rough hands braced up against the sink; and now, in the shed behind her house, wrapped up in sleeping bags against the cold, half-under the plow that won’t see sunlight until spring.)  

He’s not that good, not yet.  He tends to get distracted halfway through and finish too fast, or pull her hair a little harder than he should.  He’s got hard, sharp hipbones that leave bruises in her groin.  He’s a good kisser, though, and he always has pot.  There’s only about ten guys between fifteen and fifty in this shit town, anyway, and he’s the best-looking of them.   _Weird_ , though.  Always been weird, even then they were kids.  

She reaches across him to snag the battered silver lighter poking out of the pocket of his discarded jeans, runs her fingertips over the engraved lettering.  “ _Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley_.”  She flips it open and lights the joint.  “Cool lighter.”

He reaches over and plucks it from her fingers.  “It’s my pop’s.”

“He really crazy like they all say?” she asks, smoke billowing from her lips.  He doesn’t respond, just takes the joint from her.

She tries to think of something to talk about.  Before they fuck he always looks like a scared kid who isn’t quite sure what to do and after he always makes her feel like a moron.  “You going to that college fair thing when school starts back?”

He blows smoke rings lazily into the cold air.  “Naaaaahhhh.” That long, slow drawl that sets him apart from the nasal intonations of the north--“I’m from Texas,” he’d explained once, although that didn’t make any sense.  She’s known him since they were _five_ ; he’s always lived up here in the North Slope, in a ramshackle cabin he won’t invite her into.  

“You’re not going to college?”

“No money.”  He takes another hit before handing the joint back.  He’s looking not at her but past her, through a crack in the roof of the shed, up at the stars.  

“Then what are you gonna do?  You’re not gonna stay up here.”  She can’t imagine what he’d stay for.  He’s always bitching about the cold, and it’s not like anyone around here will miss him.  She’s the only person she knows who can stand Rust, and that’s just because of his pretty blue eyes and seemingly endless supply of grass and the way he bites her neck.  

“I’ll figure something out.”  She passes the roach to him, and he finishes it off with a deep drag before pinching the smoldering ember between thumb and forefinger.  She feels herself stir again--fucking hell, every time she thinks she’s done with him, he pulls this kind of macho shit and she’s putty in his hands again.  She wishes she could make herself cut him loose.

“Don’t drop it in here.  My folk’s’ll find it.”  He grunts and reaches over to shove the butt into the pocket of his jeans.  “Won’t your dad smell it?”

“Where the fuck you think I got it from?”  He doesn’t say _fuck_ the way she does, the way other kids in their junior class do, like something shameful and daring like a car going too fast on an icy road.  When Rust says _fuck_ it’s just like--breathing.  “What time’s the party?”

She feels her breath catch in her throat.  She didn’t think he even knew about Billy Carson’s party, even though he’s thrown it every year since junior high, always the day that school lets out for Christmas break.  She can’t even picture him at a kegger, and she doesn’t want to imagine the looks she’d get if she showed up with Creepy Cohle.  “Are you--I mean--” She tries to think of a polite way to convince him not to go.  “It’s not really your scene.”

“I was just wondering how long we had till you had to leave. I wasn’t suggesting that I come along,” he says coolly, but there’s a flicker of something in his expression--just a flicker--of anger or hurt, replaced by a grim resolve.  

“Oh.  I mean, if you--”

He reaches out from under the sleeping bags and grabs his jeans, then stands and starts to pull them on.  He doesn’t look at her as he buckles his belt.  “Jesus Christ, Marcy.  I wouldn’t be caught dead with you assholes.”

“Look, Rusty--” It’s her pet name for him; she suspects he doesn’t care much for it, suspects that she’s just trying goad him into some kind of reaction.  “You’re a nice guy and all.”

“No, I’m not.”  He pulls a ragged sweater down over his torso and she feels a twinge of regret, remembers curving her hand around his hipbone or dipping her tongue into the hollow of his throat, and considers apologizing and pulling him back down into their nest of sleeping bags.  But he cuts his eyes away from hers and they’re hard and flat and cold like the sky outside and she knows it’s done with, and probably for the best.  

“I’m just saying, we’ve had fun, but--”

“Feel free to shut the hell up any time,” he says, shrugging into his parka.  He pauses in the doorframe of the shed, bending his neck against the wind as he lights a cigarette with that weird old lighter.  

He leaves the door open when he goes; icy wind licks over her bare shoulders, rakes its fingers through her hair.

 


	5. round yon virgin, mother and child

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I am a moron who forgets that numbers and the rules that govern human existence are a thing, I finished this whole fic before I realized that the entire premise of this chapter is impossible because of when we know Sophia's birthday is. I'm in too deep to back out now. I'm sorry.

“Are you going to midnight mass this year?”

“Of course, Ma,” she says, in that quick, easy way she  does when she’s lying.  It was always in her nature to test the waters: _of course I didn’t hit my cousin, Ma, I was just trying to hug her.  Of course I didn’t sneak off and go to the movies, Daddy, I was in the library._ Luis wishes it bothered him more, but she’s his only daughter, and he’s always indulged her.  “At St. Mary Magdalene.”

Across the table the new boyfriend lifts his eyebrows in surprise and Claire drops a conspiratorial wink.  ( _Of course we’re not getting serious, Daddy.  He’s just a friend_ .)  She’s never brought a boy home before and Luis can’t imagine for the life of him why she’d start with this one.   _Rust_ , he calls himself, like something corroded and nasty on the bottom of a car in Luis’s shop.  He looks grimy and weathered next to her. _Claire_ : clear, it means; bright, brilliant.  A wide smile outlined in red lipstick, flashing black eyes, a laugh like glass breaking.  He’d wanted to name her _Clareta_ for his mother, but Alma thought life would be easier for her with an Anglo name.  But nothing has ever seemed to be easy for Claire; she talks too loudly, hates too strongly, wants too much.

He spends half the meal internally wrestling with his immediate dislike of this kid; he’s not sure if it’s warranted, or if it’s simply the instinctive response any father would have towards the guy who’s screwing his little girl, or if he’s just disappointed that she’s dating a white boy.  But by the time the meal’s over and they’re seated on recliners in the living room, he’s not undecided anymore.  The white boy doesn’t like sports; _fútbol_ he could understand, but he’s clueless about American football and baseball and basketball too.  He doesn’t care that the kid doesn’t go to church, but when Claire and Alma take their traditional place at the piano it becomes clear that he doesn’t even know the words to half the Christmas carols.  And he’s training to be a cop--a career that, as far as Luis can tell, people only get into because they’re willing to risk their lives for thirty grand a year and the chance to kick people around.  The only thing they have in common is that they both like beer--and by halftime, Claire’s new boyfriend is putting away two for every one of Luis’s and he’s starting to say some seriously weird shit.  

As the evening is winding down and Alma and Claire are washing up the dishes and getting ready to set out dessert, the boyfriend steps out for a smoke and Luis follows him out into the carport.  He leans, long and lanky, against the side of the house as he lights his cigarette and looks down at Luis through half-lidded eyes.

“This the part where you tell me I’m too good for your little girl?” he says in that infuriating drawl.  He doesn’t sound angry.  A little scornful, maybe.  Mostly he sounds tired.

Luis folds his arms over his chest to keep from punching the sonofabitch in the face.  “I know she's not perfect,” he says.  “She’s made some mistakes, and she’s always been a little wild.  But she’s my daughter, and yeah, she deserves better than some drunk redneck cop.”

He takes a long, slow drag of his cigarette and exhales without too much concern for the proximity of the smoke to Luis’s face.  “Claire’s pregnant,” he says, and without another word saunters off to wait by the car. 


	6. I've got a feeling / this year's for me and you

“What the fuck’s this?”

“Don’t say fuck around the baby, Rust,” Claire says mechanically as she pours a small pile of Cheerios onto the tray of Sophia’s high chair.  She feels like she says that to him a lot these days. The baby's almost two now, and she’s starting to repeat everything she hears.

As if in confirmation, Sophia places a Cheerio in her mouth, grins, and says decisively, “Fuck.”

“See?  I told you.”

Rust is standing by the pile of bags she brought home from the mall this morning, brandishing a Polaroid photo in a paper frame.  He’s got that _look_ on his face, the one where he’s too aggravated to properly form words and his eyes are bugging out of his skull, his lips pressed in a thin line.  She doesn’t know what the hell’s wrong this time, and she’s not in the mood for twenty questions.  “What?  I took her to get her picture with Santa.”

“We _talked_ about this.  Don't you remember?”

“Of course I remember.”  She doesn't.  Rust talks about a lot of shit and at least half of it’s kind of crazy, so she's sort of developed selective memory.

“We agreed that we weren’t gonna raise her with that kind of bullshit, Claire.”

“Buwwshit Cway-uh,” Sophia echoes.  

“Shush, baby,” Rust says, his tone softening as it always does when he addresses her.  “Don’t say bullshit.”

“Buww-shit.”

“We said we weren’t gonna raise her with any kind of _religion_ ,” Claire replies, opening a jar of peas.  “Which I’m totally on board with.  This isn’t--”

“I really don’t see the difference.”

“What?” She pauses, jar in one hand and spoon in the other. No matter now many times she thinks she's plumbed the absolute depths of her husband's weirdness, he always manages to surprise her.

“Imaginary, supernaturally powerful, omniscient paternal figure who rewards believers if they adhere to his standards of conduct--”

“You’ve _got_ to be kidding me.”

“--and punishes those who don’t.  Both are usually depicted as old men with white beards.”  He crosses his arms over his chest, looking utterly satisfied with his argument.

“Santa’s fat,” she mutters, spooning peas out onto Sophia’s plate.  “God isn’t fat.”  It’s not a remotely logical response, but sometimes if you hit Rust with enough illogical responses fast enough, he’ll get annoyed and give up.  “Rust, it’s _Santa Claus._ Every little kid is taught to believe in Santa Claus.”

“I don’t see any reason to raise her believing in delusions just because they’re culturally mandated.”

“What happens when she starts school and ends up telling all the little boys and girls in her class that Santa doesn’t exist?  Their parents won’t be happy about that.”

“That’s their fuckin’ problem for teaching that bullshit to their stupid-ass kids.”

“Ass-kids,” says Sophia, helping herself to another Cheerio.

Claire leans forward and covers Sophia’s ears with her hands, affixing her husband with an icy black stare.  “Keep it up,” she hisses.  “You’ll come home tomorrow and find _Miracle on 34th Street_ in the VCR and one of those inflatable plastic Santas on the roof, Rust, I swear to fucking Christ.  Let. It. Go.”

He puts his hands up in an attitude of passive-aggressive surrender and stalks away.  “Fine,” he yells over his shoulder.  “But if she grows up seeking meaning in illogical belief systems, Claire, that’s on you.” His voice floats in from the living room, dripping with contempt. “She'll probably end up _Catholic._ ”

She hands Sophia her little spoon and helps guide her chubby fist as she scoops up peas.  “Eat up, sweetie,” she says. “And ignore your daddy.  He’s just trying to ruin Christmas.  Again.”

 


	7. God and sinners reconciled

“What the _fuck_ is that.”

It’s times like this--when Crash gets that  _tone_ \--that Ginger wants to put his fist through the motherfucker’s face.  It’s nothing you can put your finger on exactly--a certain half-swallowed contempt, like he’s choking on his own tongue in an effort not to call them a bunch of classless redneck assholes. He’s not exactly sure where he’s from (Phoenix, he says when he’s high; Vegas, he says when he’s drunk) but something about him has always seemed…  _off_ , when he’s here among the bikers and barmaids.  Like Crash is slumming.

“What do you think it is, motherfucker?” Ginger retorts.  “It’s a goddamn Christmas tree.”

What it  _is_ is a nine-foot-tall tower of dented Schlitz cans, precariously placed in a vaguely conical shape, spray-painted green and wound about with blinking lights.  Took Melanie, the girl who tends bar, the better part of the afternoon to assemble it.  Crash just grunts disdainfully, lights a cigarette, and goes to sit in one of the booths.  Ginger hangs back at the bar, has a whiskey, pretends to flirt with Melanie while he keeps an eye on the comings and goings of his club.  

“He here yet?” Miles asks, kicking the door closed and pulling off his gloves.  Ginger nods to the back of the bar, where smoke hangs in a bluish cloud over Crash’s head.  Of course he’s here.  Crash is many things, including obnoxious and usually high, but he’s never late.  “He talk to his people over the border?”

“Yeah.  Shipment’s coming in next week.  Said he’d give the details when you got here.”  Ginger slides off the bar stool and is starting towards the back of the bar when Miles tugs on his sleeve.

“Hey,” he says.  “Do  _not_ invite him.”

After the customary round of shots, Crash gets down to brass tacks.  They’re trading guns for coke with an MC on the outskirts of Matamoros.  Crash will make the trade and meet them back at the warehouse with the goods.

“When?”

“Shipment’s comin’ in Tuesday midnight.  I’ll be back Wednesday morning, ‘round eight.”

“Wednesday?”

Crash puts a cigarette between his lips.  “Did I fucking stutter?”

“You do realize that’s Christmas.”

“What, you got plans?”

Ginger does have plans; they all do.  Miles, like half the guys in the IC, has kids, and those kids are going to be unwrapping toy motorcycles and child-sized leather jackets Wednesday morning.  By noon the whole club--wives, girlfriends, kids, pets--will be gathered around a bonfire in Ginger’s front yard, drinking beer, roasting wieners and, hopefully, deep-frying a turkey without Mitch damn near blowing himself sky-high like last year.  Only he can't say so without inviting him—no point pissing off a good connection, but no one fucking wants Crash there, drinking up all the booze and acting like he’s smarter than everyone else.

“No plans,” Ginger says.  Later that evening, the club will draw straws to see who gets stuck spending Christmas morning with Crash.

 


	8. disperse the gloomy clouds of night / and death's dark shadows put to flight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Morales's name, which I suppose has become fanon at this point, is from Teethwax's "Senses."

When Agent Jake Morales was growing up in El Paso, one year--fifth grade, he thinks it was--his teacher read _A Christmas Carol_ aloud to the class, in its entirety, over the course of a week before they let out for the holidays.  It’s not a nice story, not like you’d think it was if you saw it on TV.  Oh, it’s warm and fuzzy enough in the end, but it’s filled with nasty things up until then, brutality and greed and callousness and vice.  A reminder that the world is a cesspool and Christmas is just a glittery distraction.   _I don’t know why you’re always looking for the bad in things_ , his wife says, and every time she says it, part of him blames Charles Dickens.  

There’s one passage that haunts him in particular: “ _From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.  . . . . They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread. . . . ‘This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both.’”_

He thinks of those children a lot--he’s seen Ignorance and Want make monsters of plenty of people in his line of work, on both sides of the badge--but he never thought he’d see one in the flesh, here in a Waffle House on the north side of Houston.  The apparition sitting across from him looks like a collection of twigs glued into the approximation of a man.  His skin is gray and stretched too tight across the bones of his face; his hair curls lifelessly at the temples.  His eyes are two black holes in his skull.

Sobriety is not a good look for Detective Rustin Cohle.

“It’s good to see you.”

He’s told a lot of lies in his time but this one’s the biggest.  There’s nothing good about this, and they both know it.  Still, his former charge stretches white, cracked lips back over his teeth in what Morales can only assume is supposed to be a smile.   _They been working on his interpersonal skills up at the loony bin_ , the chief said.  He doesn’t envy whoever’s in charge of _that_ task.  

Cohle doesn’t answer; he hasn’t spoken yet, not even when the waitress came for their order. Morales ordered him a burger and hashbrowns while she politely tried to avoid Cohle’s silent, glassy-eyed stare.  When she arrives with the food, he eyes his plate suspiciously for a moment and then pushes it away.

“You should eat something.”

He shakes his head vigorously, then tilts a bit to one side, as if the movement has made him dizzy.  He looks desperately nauseated.

“I know it’s tough.  I remember when I got clean--”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”  His voice sounds gritty from disuse and he’s enunciating oddly, as if worried that he’s about to start projectile vomiting into his former handler’s eggs.  “I wasn’t aware your fifth-of-Jack-a-day habit was comparable to coming off _meth_.”

“You put yourself in this situation, Cohle,” he retorts, and immediately regrets it.  

That skeleton smile again--Christ, it’s like he can hear the tendons in the side of his face creaking.  “You know, you’re right, Jake.  Thanks so much for the reminder.”  He’s talking slowly, even more slowly than he used to.  He sounds like a record playing at the wrong speed.

Morales fiddles with his silverware, doesn’t meet Cohle’s gaze.  “Look, you’re gonna be okay.  You take the psych pension, retire somewhere nice.  Maybe take up fishing.” Does Cohle fish? No one seems to know what he _does,_ other than work and get high, and he's not doing either these days. “All you need’s some rest.”

“Not gonna.”

“What?”

“Pension.  Not taking it.”  Cohle picks up a bottle of hot sauce and starts to sprinkle it methodically over his food, although he still shows no signs of actually eating it.  

“Christ, Cohle.  You can’t possibly be planning on going back out there.”

“No, not back.  Not narco.”  He’s staring out the window at the night sky now, hands playing with sugar packets seemingly of their own accord, feet shuffling under the table.  His words come out in soft, short bursts of sound that seem to float in the air without landing.  “Homicide.”

“Homicide? Why the fuck would you--”

“I read a Bible verse.”

“You’re an atheist, Cohle.”

He opens his mouth as if he’s going to explain, then seems to think better of it and only shakes his head.  “Never mind.  I’m not your fucking problem anymore, that’s my point.”

(“‘ _Are there no prisons?’ said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses?’”_ )

“Look, man.”  Morales pushes his own plate away; he seems to have lost his appetite, too.  “Why don’t you come over for Christmas dinner?  Lucia’s doing a turkey, the whole works.  It’ll do you good to get a home-cooked meal.”

“Christmas?  When’s Christmas?”  That disconnected blue gaze wanders back uncertainly towards Morales’s face.

“Week from tomorrow.”

“Today is--”

“The 17th.”  And since Cohle still looks a little confused, he clarifies: “Of December.”

He stares at Morales a moment, then turns to the window again.  He blinks once, twice, his lips pressed in a tight grimace.

“Cohle?”

“It’s almost January,” he says.

 

 


	9. but mark right well what came to pass / from every door repelled, alas

“Ow.   _Ow_ , Mom.”

Audrey’s never liked the Christmas party; she doesn’t like having to put on the new velvet dress Grandma sends every year (red, this time; Macie’s is green), hates having her hair brushed until it crackles with electricity and shines like gold.  But Macie loves it.  She loves having her hair done, even though it snags in the brush and it’s dishwater-brown like Mommy’s and not sunshine-yellow like Daddy’s.  Loves to spin around in her new dress until her skirt fans out like petals on a flower.  And she likes circulating the room with a cheeseball and crackers on a tray while Audrey stands sentry behind the punch bowl, scowling and using the cordless phone to send messages to her friends’ beepers.

“It’s the hostess’s job to make sure everyone’s happy and comfortable,” Grandma says, “it’s a very important responsibility.”  Even at eight Macie knows she’s very good at it: she knows which of Mommy’s friends Grandma doesn’t like, which of daddy’s friends need to be distracted away from the drinks table; who likes Christmas carols, who hates eggnog, which cousin can't have peanut-butter cookies.

She’s made sure to offer appetizers to everyone in the den and dining room, but she looks out the window and glimpses a dark figure out on the lawn, so she slips out the door to see if whoever’s out there wants turkey roulade or pigs-in-a-blanket.  It’s dark and moonless and all she can make out is a tall, spare figure and the glowing ember of a cigarette.

(“He looks like River Phoenix,” Audrey had whispered, the first time they saw him.  “No, he doesn’t,” Macie replied.  “He looks like a scarecrow.”)

She hangs back in the shadows for a minute, carefully balancing the tray like a waitress on television.  Grownups usually like Macie; they warm to her more quickly than to her sister.  But Mr. Cohle tends to just kind of stare down his nose at her like she’s some curious new species of insect.  Anyway, she and Audrey haven’t seen much of him ever since the brunch when Audrey announced that she had to do a report on George Washington and he replied “You know that cherry tree thing’s bullshit, right?  Typical American neoimperialist self-mythologization, making up stories to demonstrate the value of honesty.”

She’s still trying to work up her courage to approach when the door opens and her mother emerges and goes over to Mr. Cohle.  He doesn’t look at her; he’s looking up at the stars.  They are quiet for a long moment.

“I’m not going to apologize,” he says abruptly.  “You should’ve known better than to invite me.”

“My dad’s a little bit drunk.”

“Your dad’s a supercilious prick.  No wonder Marty hates him.”

Macie doesn’t know what _supercilious_ means, but she suspects Mr. Cohle’s right about Daddy and Grandpa.  She thinks that her father pretends to like a lot of people that he can’t stand but that he likes Mr. Cohle for real, even if he refers to him as “that psycho son of a bitch” about once a week.

“Marty doesn’t _hate_ him.”

“Yes he does.”

There’s a long pause.  “I think you’ve filled your honesty quota for the evening, Rust,” she finally replies, and goes back inside.

He walks back to the porch, settles on the steps, hangs his head in an attitude of exhaustion.  She can see the knobs of the top of his spine curving over the back of his loose shirt collar.  He looks sad.

“Hey, Mr. Cohle.”

He looks up in surprise.  “Hey, Macie,” he says in that careful, slightly high-pitched tone he takes with her and her sister.  She didn’t think he knew her name.

She settles on the step beside him, crinoline rustling beneath her skirt.  She starts to offer him an appetizer, then thinks better of it and places the tray carefully beside her.  She thinks for a moment, then fishes an object out of the pocket of her dress; she’d made it in class that day and had been carrying it around so she could show it off.  It’s a candy cane decorated like a reindeer, with pipe-cleaner antlers and a red pom-pom nose and a pair of googly eyes.

“You should have this.”

He stares at the candy cane for a moment and then slowly takes it, as if not accustomed to being offered presents.  “Thank you,” he says.  “It looks too nice to eat.”

“You’re not sposed to eat it.  You’re sposed to hang it on your tree.”

“I haven’t got one.”  He takes the cigarette from his mouth and carefully blows smoke away from her.

“Then, I don’t know, hang it from a lamp or something!  Geez, Mr. Cohle.”  Macie sometimes wonders how grownups manage to do anything.

He gives her a sort of smile that makes him look even sadder.  “Sorry, Macie.  I’m not very good at Christmas.”  He takes a deep drag off his cigarette and stands.  “I gotta get.  Tell your mom I’m sorry for fu--” he pauses and corrects himself.  “For messing up the party.”

“It’s not messed up,” she says, even through the open window she can see her parents arguing in the kitchen, can barely make out her father saying “look, it was _your_ idea to invite him.”

He starts to cross the lawn.  “Merry Christmas, Mr. Cohle,” she calls after him.

“You too, Macie.”  She sees him hang the candy cane from the rearview mirror of his truck before he drives away.

 


	10. I’d be merry, but I’m Hebrew

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Hannah O. for the helpful feedback on this chapter!

Laurie can tell as soon as he answers the phone that he’s neck-deep into a case and doesn’t want to be disturbed, not even by a dinner invitation from his own girlfriend.  He probably thinks this is the one day of the year that he’ll be left alone to stare at whatever weird shit he’s got currently stapled to the wall of his apartment.  “It’s tradition,” she says.

“Tradition,” he replies dryly, “is a misguided attempt to hold onto something that never really existed.”

“What do you care?  You’ve got the day off and you like Chinese.”

There’s a pause where she can practically hear the calculations in his head as he weighs out the benefits of maintaining successful human relationships versus the benefits of getting his own way.  “Fine,” he says finally, “but Nine Dragon, not that other place over on Coursey.  They’ve got lousy fortunes.”

 _You could just not read the fortunes_ she doesn’t say; he always reads the fortunes even though he never eats the cookies, and he always finds them wanting.  Anyway, he’s already hung up the phone.  

She’s glad he agreed to come out; she’s been lonely lately, what with every new acquaintance she’s made down south busy all December with Christmas parties, neighborhood caroling, midnight masses.  The homesickness surprises her--it’s not Hanukkah she’s missing, not exactly.  Her parents weren’t particularly observant; the menorah and occasional bag of chocolate gelt were mostly concessions to Laurie and her sister, who bitched in their younger years about not getting to have a Christmas tree like their friends. No, it’s not the season; it’s the _weather_.  

It wasn’t so bad at first.  She moved down here in April and sure, the weather warmed more quickly than she’d expected and yeah, stepping outside was like stepping into a sauna, but she’d been through hot summers growing up in Pennsylvania, hotter ones in med school in Maryland.  And every square foot of indoor space in Louisiana seemed to be bone-chillingly air-conditioned.  That wasn’t the problem.  

No, the problem was around September, when she started catching herself looking at the trees, expecting subtle changes in their color while they remained stubbornly, unswervingly green.  October, when she realized that the box of scarves and gloves she’d carried in from the U-Haul had not yet been unpacked, probably would never be unpacked.  November, scanning the skies for signs of snow that would never come.  And now, Christmas fucking Day.  Sixty-seven degrees and humid.

“Don’t you miss it?”

He pauses in lifting a spoonful of egg drop soup to his mouth and she realizes that she’s lost inside her own head again.  No matter; he wouldn’t have noticed, he’s always lost inside his own.  “Miss what?”

She stabs at her sweet-and-sour chicken; it doesn’t taste as good as it did when she was a kid, when she and Beth would throw fried wontons across the table at each other as multicolored lights blinked along the windows of the China Garden and snow fell in thick white drifts outside.  “Being up north, this time of year.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, snow was always a pain in the ass, but this--” she gestures at the open window where tepid air is rolling in.  “This heat, in the middle of winter.  It just seems _wrong_.”

He fiddles with his napkin in the way he always does when he’s finished a meal and wants one of the cigarettes that he pretends not to smoke anymore.  “Nah, I never cared for the cold, myself.”

He’s clearly not in the mood to talk, so she finds herself filling the silence like she does so often in his presence.  Hears herself start to reminisce: green leaves fading to yellow, orange, fire-red before dropping to the ground and leaving bare branches, black and skeletal, against the steely depthlessness of a winter sky.  Mittens and galoshes and cold wind biting at your cheeks.  Sledding at Ridley Creek, ice skating in Lancaster.  Snowmen, snow shoes, hot chocolate with marshmallows.  And Hanukkah.  The light of candles reflected against the window on a cold night, the smell of frying food.  She feels very far from home; the sound of her own voice, spinning those images into the air, comforts her.

She knows she’s being maudlin, that her nostalgia is driving out all the times she trudged to school through gray slush or cursed at the appearance of an April snow, or the way every spring felt like coming back from the dead.  With anyone else such flights of fancy would be acceptable--who _doesn’t_ get a little blue this time of year?--but he starts to tilt his chair back as she speaks, eyeing her under half-closed lids, and she knows he’s writing her off as self-deluding, simple, like a criminal in the interrogation room who’s not smart enough to tell a good lie, or a child who still believes in Santa Claus.

_I want our kids to grow up somewhere where it snows._

She can feel the words under her tongue, behind her teeth, threatening to spill out like honey.  She’s told him she wants children; she hasn’t yet said _with you._ “It just makes me miss being a kid,” she finishes lamely, and it’s the wrong thing to say; she can tell by the acerbic little half-chuckle he gives in response.  Rust only laughs when he’s angry.  

“Yeah,” he says, his voice a blade swaddled in velvet, “all that sounds real nice.”

“What about you?  Growing up in Alaska I’m sure you--”

“Nah, I didn’t do any of that shit.”

“None of it?  You never went sledding or--”

“Yeah, I owned snowshoes, we had a sled.  We used ‘em for tracking, for hauling back game.  The skates were for ice fishing.  There wasn’t much call for a Christmas tree with trees all the fuck around us, but some years we’d pick out one nearby and string it up with popcorn and dried berries, and some years we didn’t because we didn’t have any extra food to spare.  And there weren’t any fucking presents, not for one night or eight nights or any goddamn nights.  I mean, fuck, Laurie, it sounds like you grew up in some kinda Norman Rockwell fever dream.”  He throws his napkin down and pulls the check towards himself with a decisive motion, even though it’s her turn to pay.  

Every conversation with him is a negotiation--not with him, but with herself; how much shit she’ll put up with _this_ time.  “Christ Almighty,” she says, “you’d think you could lay off me for one day--just _one day_ \--and allow me to be a human being with actual feelings.  I should’ve just come and eaten Chinese by my goddamn self.”

He signs the receipt with a flourish and stands.  “I’ll be in the car when you’re ready.”

When he’s gone she reaches across the table, unwraps his fortune cookie, and crushes it in her fist.  She lets the crumbs scatter on the table and pulls the fragile piece of paper from its center.  

_Be on the lookout for coming events; they cast their shadows beforehand._

 


	11. lord, I tried to fetch religion boys, but the devil he will not let me pray / that's why I gotta stay drunk all day Christmas day

There are two types of people; the type that want to give everyone an earful every time they’ve got worries, and the type that want someone who’ll shut the hell up and pour the drinks in silence.  There’s more of the first kind, but the second kind are more loyal.  Business builds so slow that every year Robert Doumain thinks he’s just going to cash in his military pension and sell the place and rent a trailer somewhere on the Gulf; but every year the bar does a little better than the last, and every year he’s a little older and his arthritis is a little worse, until finally one morning in mid-December he wakes up and it’s cold and damp and it feels like there’s a rusty saw playing _Hark the Herald Angels Sing_ on his bones, and he realizes he’s either gonna have to hire some help or shut the place down.  

It takes him awhile to get going and it’s almost eleven, just when he’s finally done getting set up for the day, when a red pickup pulls up in front of the bar.  The driver is a worn-down, gangly fuck with long stringy hair and two days’ worth of stubble; he’s twenty years younger than Robert but damn near looks older.  He looks like he wants something to drink and a lot of it, but first he takes a large black notebook out from under his arm and starts to ask questions about Joey.

People have been trying to get Robert to talk his entire life, and they got insistent to the point of desperation when Joey disappeared.  His wife, the grief counselor she insisted they see, the preacher at the local church, old ladies in flowered hats bearing fruit baskets and covered dishes.  And the cops, of course.  An endless parade of fuckers with badges who asked a lot of questions and did precisely fuck-all.  Each one of them so convinced, in their own way, that he could rid himself of the pain by spitting it out in words, like pulling up rusty fishhooks on a line up through your throat.  Well, his hurt is his own, and it’s not gonna do himself or anyone else any good to spill it all out everywhere, and sooner or later everyone realized that and left him be: the cops, the neighbors, the counselor, the preacher, and finally his wife.  

The guy with the notebook looks rough around the edges but he’s got this way of talking, his voice slow and low like pebbles rolling down a hill.  It makes you want to listen to what he has to say, almost makes you want to respond, and you can tell by his manner that he’s used to getting information out of people when he wants it.  But Robert isn’t most people, and after five minutes of silent stares and monosyllabic responses he finally replies “I said all I had to say about that fifteen years ago.  You want to buy a drink, I’ll pour you one.  Otherwise, get the fuck out of my bar before I put a bullet in you.”

“I got three in me already,” his guest replies, “but I’ll take that drink.”  Five shots of Jameson later, he’s accepted a job tending bar on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  It’s goddamn Christmas come early.

The days off do him good; by the following Saturday he’s feeling rested enough to go in early and count inventory, close out the books for the year.  Figure he’ll just shut up for the day, since no one comes in to drink on Christmas anyhow.  But he goes in to find Cohle is already there, counting bottles and boxes, checking off forms, shuffling receipts into neat little piles.  

“Figured you’d want today off,” Robert says.  

“Figured you would,” Cohle replies, and in the still morning air is the silent acknowledgment that neither of them have anywhere else to be today.  They’re finished by noon and spend the rest of the day sitting at the bar, drinking, saying not a word.


	12. comfort and joy

She waits until the morning of the 24th to call; he can imagine the internal debate that must of carried on for days before she finally picked up the phone.  Ten years have come and gone without his presence around the Christmas tree, but things have changed the last six months.  It’s not that they’re back to normal--whatever normal even is, and he’s not sure anymore--but both girls called him on his birthday, then he met Macie for ice cream when she was in town last month, and then they dropped by late Thanksgiving with what was left of their mom’s pumpkin pie and sat around the table, talking and laughing with relative ease, until nearly eleven.

Marty knows he’s only getting admitted back into the family provisionally and he doesn’t have any place making demands, but he does have one condition: “I'm bringin' Rust.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Maggie says skeptically.  “I mean, Ted… he knows why we ended it, Marty.”

It’s not a good idea, and he knows it.  But Rust is… not quite right, these days.  Not that he ever was, but he figures this last decade has been rougher on him than Marty thought.  He’s fragile like he used to be when they first met--edgy, sleepless, like he might break apart if you shook him too hard--but back then he was at least trying to be a part of things, however awkwardly and reluctantly.  They used to _argue_ —Christ, they were like cats and dogs—and Marty never thought he’d miss _that_. But what he saw when he was bleeding out in Carcosa took a lot of the fight out of him.  

Once, not long before they drove out to take down Childress, they were going at each other in the car like they always had. Rust said some crap about how the only thing a man had was what he'd commit himself to and Marty couldn't ever commit to anything, and Marty said the only thing Rust could ever commit to was being a sonofabitch, and then he said “You're like a forest fire, is what you are. Everyone thinks you're so goddamn impressive but all you do is burn down everything in your path.”

Part of him still thinks Rust is a forest fire, and that if Marty had any goddamn sense he'd get the hell out of his way; but these days he's more like a flame that's about to go out, guttering and uncertain, and it's Marty's job to keep his hands curled around him so the wind can't get in.

Rust is on the living-room couch, feet propped up on the coffee table in spite of many, many recommendations on Marty’s part that he fucking stop doing that.  Files are spread over every available surface within arm’s reach, because Marty draws the line at stapling shit to the walls.  “That was Maggie,” he says.  “They want us there tonight.”

“What for?”

“For Christmas, asshole.”

“No one wants me anywhere for Christmas, Marty,” he says flatly, without looking up from a stack of tax records.  “Go be with your family.”

He asks Rust twice more if he’s sure he doesn’t want to go; Rust just ignores him.  So he asks him three times, as he’s getting ready to leave, whether he’ll be all right here alone.  He gets a grunt the first time and then just withering glances after that. Finally, as he's halfway out the door clutching a box of chocolate-chip cookies from Publix, he turns back one last time.

“Get the fuck out of here or I'm flushing all your fishing lures down the toilet,” Rust says, before Marty has a chance to speak.

And so he pulls out of the driveway, turns on the windshield wipers against the rain, points the car north. Turns the knob on the radio and plays Christmas carols too loud. Speculates as to whether Maggie's cooking has improved in the last ten years, or whether Ted makes enough that she can pay someone to make Christmas dinner for her. Wonders if he'll finally get to meet Audrey's boyfriend.

But it's no good: he can _see_ Rust on that couch, staring sightlessly at the wall because the motherfucker won’t turn on the TV, pacing up and down the hallway when he can't sleep, standing on the back porch smoking and staring up at the stars like they've got answers to questions he can't even formulate.  Then he pulls over to the side of the road and takes out his phone.

Forty minutes later he pulls up back at the apartment, bearing a plastic bag holding two styrofoam containers.  “Turkey dinners from Louie’s.  Hope they ain’t cold.”

Rust just stares at him, unlit cigarette frozen halfway to his mouth, for perhaps five seconds.  Finally: “What the fuck you doing here, Marty?”

“Live here, don’t I?”

He goes into the kitchen, drops the bag on the counter, goes to pour iced tea.  Calls back into the living room: “I called Maggie, talked to the girls. They’re gonna come out here for New Year’s.”

Rust leans in the doorway, looking for all the world like he's about to give Marty an earful but he stays silent, toying nervously with his lighter.  He looks somehow angry and grateful at the same time.

For a moment Marty contemplates dishing the takeout onto actual plates, but he figures that would be overkill. Instead he strips the wrapper from a plastic fork and hands it to Rust. “We oughta get a tree,” he says.

“It’s Christmas Eve.”

“Good.  Whatever’s left’ll be cheap.”

“Whatever's left'll be shit,” Rust mutters. He eases the container open and steam curls around his face.

They sit at the kitchen table and Marty realizes it's the first time they've had dinner in here instead of on the TV trays. “So we'll fancy it up with ornaments. Like the Charlie Brown movie.”

“Never seen it.”

“Goddamnit, Rust.” It's like trying to have a conversation with a space alien, sometimes. “It's a cartoon movie where the kid ends up with a shitty tree and he and his little friends dress it up and make it all nice and it saves Christmas or some shit. Christ, it's as old as we are, I don't know how you never saw it.”

“Fine. You got ornaments?”

Marty pauses, a container of gravy tilted over his mashed potatoes. “Fuck,” he says. Maggie ended up with all of that stuff, though he doesn't know whether she threw it all out or kept it somewhere in her attic—the blinking multicolored lights and papier-mâché decorations handmade by the girls had been replaced at some point in the last decade by tasteful clear lights and glass ornaments. He imagines Audrey and Macie here a week from now, sitting awkwardly on his thrift-store couch in this drab beige apartment. No nicely decorated tree, no home-cooked meal. He puts down his fork, suddenly depressed. Fucking stupid of him to think he'd be able to give anyone a nice Christmas. “We ain't got any.”

“All right then.” Rust takes out his pocketknife.  “Any cans in the fridge?”

  



End file.
